Jérôme Sainte-Marie is the founder of PollingVox, a research and consulting firm specializing in issues of opinion. He publishes
Le Bloc populaire (
editions du Cerf, 2021).
LE FIGARO.- The candidate of rebellious France Jean-Luc Mélenchon occupies third place in terms of voting intentions, with 13% of the vote, according to a poll carried out by the Elabe Institute published on Tuesday. How can this dynamic in favor of the LFI candidate be explained?
Jerome SAINTE-MARIE.-
The profusion of published polls is accompanied during this presidential campaign by a certain dissonance.
Depending on how voter turnout is discounted, voting intentions do not quite send the same message.
Thus, when the Elabe Institute places Jean-Luc Mélenchon at two points in the second round, the “rolling” of OpinionWay gives him seven points from second place, and that of Ifop, at seven and a half.
The enthusiasm of sympathizers of rebellious France is quite understandable, as well as the instrumentalization of this isolated alert by those of Marine Le Pen, but all this is largely overplayed.
I note in passing that there are no more sensitive to the results of the published polls than the supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has a once again galvanized militant force, capable of providing him with well-made meetings.
Jerome Sainte-Marie
On the relative dynamics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's campaign, the first thing to indicate is that there remains a large left in the country.
Without counting the one who votes for the President of the Republic, the former second left dear to Michel Rocard, a quarter of those registered disperse their vote between different left-wing candidates: we don't always want to see it, but that's as much as the cumulative electorates of Éric Zemmour and Valérie Pécresse.
The leader of rebellious France gathers half of them.
Above all, he has a militant force that is once again galvanized, capable of providing him with well-made meetings.
Finally, he is a formidable tribune, regardless of the relevance of his remarks.
On this basis, can we conclude that Jean-Luc Mélenchon has a chance of making it to the second round?
What does the average opinion measure tell us?
First of all that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even admitting that he is at 13% as indicated by Elabe, is at a level closer to that of 2012 – 11.1% of the votes cast – than to that of 2017 - 19.6%.
Moreover, the same polling institute indicates that it would gather today only half of its voters of five years ago, without biting significantly on the former electorate of Benoît Hamon.
The rapprochement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the second round would be due above all to the concomitant weakening of Valérie Pécresse and Éric Zemmour.
Jerome Sainte-Marie
Still for
Elabe
, his approximation of the second round would be due above all to the concomitant weakening of Valérie Pécresse and Éric Zemmour, on which the various measures converge, and that of Marine Le Pen, something not proven at for example OpinionWay and Ifop.
There remains one common fact: while voting intentions in favor of Emmanuel Macron soar, the bar for access to the second round for the other candidates is much lower than in 2022. Here is what grounds the hopes of rebellious France, even if, let us remember again, no poll today gives Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the second round and that most indicate that he would be very far from it.
During the European elections, Jean-Luc Mélenchon had abandoned his populist line to join the union of the left. He softened the sovereignism that had marked the presidential campaign and notably began to defend minorities more. Could this “left-wing” turn harm him?
Since 2018 Jean-Luc Mélenchon considers that the “release” parenthesis is closed in France and even, considering the evolution of Syriza in Greece and Podémos in Spain, throughout Europe.
He also postulates, something particularly debatable, that Emmanuel Macron would be a "right-wing" president, a new Nicolas Sarkozy in a way.
From then on, it returned to the signifier "left" to embody alternation.
This abandonment of populism as a political line finds its counterpart in Éric Zemmour when he intends to carry out a “union of the rights”.
If, as the polls indicate at this stage, the second round again opposed Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, who are part of a new divide, everyone will be able to appreciate the correctness of these strategic choices...
For Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the return to the fundamentals of the left will have been edifying.
Jumbled up, on reading the declarations and texts signed by the parliamentarians of rebellious France, this will have meant an assumed cultural leftism, a pro-migrant or even "no border" orientation proclaimed, a radicalized anti-nuclear commitment and a critical of the temperate European Union.
Read also Presidential 2022: Mélenchon pleads for “another world”, at a meeting in Lyon
Ironically, we can see the application of the program of the famous Terra Nova note of 2011, the one which theorized the replacement of the popular base of the left by the different "minorities".
There is, moreover, an old orientation of the movementist left in this direction, notably in the Trotskyist current, the ancestor of the NPA, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), some of whose veterans have some influence within rebellious France.
The current period is marked by a sharp rise in the price of gasoline and gas. Can a dynamic build up in favor of Jean-Luc Mélenchon around the question of purchasing power?
Neither the war in Ukraine nor Covid-19 has taken away the financial difficulty faced by millions of households.
In the priority factors of the presidential vote, the polls show purchasing power and social protection in first place, alongside security and immigration.
However, the social dimension is very present in the speech of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who makes public expenditure an inexhaustible source of treatment of the problems: more means, more personnel.
This meets a great echo among civil servants but also among other beneficiaries of the French redistributive model without appearing credible to the greatest number.
There must be underlined a fundamental and credible fact, despite the most recent polls: in the second round,
